


Molly Houses in Soho

by kashinoha



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Gen, Humor, gen - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-04
Updated: 2012-11-04
Packaged: 2017-11-17 17:10:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/553923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kashinoha/pseuds/kashinoha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every year the Dept. of General Affairs holds exams for all scythe-wielding Shinigami. While helping him study, William is reminded of the fact that Grell's actually a genius mechanic. Takes place sometime in the late 18th-early 19th century.</p>
<p>All characters © Toboso Yana</p>
            </blockquote>





	Molly Houses in Soho

**Molly Houses in Soho**

 

 

William T. Spears grits his teeth and tries not to look like he’s sucking on a mouthful of sour patch kids. “Twenty-nine,” he says through a clenched jaw.

Grell sighs and shakes his head with stage-sympathy. The beads of miniature skulls depending from his spectacles clack together. "Think of those poor twenty-eight souls before me," he laments as he slowly rotates a pencil between his fingers, "never getting the chance to study with you."

"I only agreed to help you because your case is so utterly hopeless," William replies. He straightens his glasses with a black-gloved finger, careful not to touch the lenses. "I’d rather you not be the laughingstock of the London Division. Not that you aren't already."

Grell ruffles his hair unabashed. He is letting it grow out, and has it tied away from his face with a velvet bow (although a few errant strands manage to slip across his brow from time to time). "People come to you for help every year for the exams, and you always turn them down," he says, and grins. "I'm just special, aren't I, Will?"

"Indeed."

"Can't I just skip the exams?” Grell asks. “They're easy enough to get out of." And oh, for the love of Death he is pouting like he is sixty again.

"The Department of General Affairs insists that _all_ scythe-wielding Shinigami take the exams," Will says, narrowing his eyes. "And after you were _conveniently_ absent for last year's I'm responsible for making sure you _don't_ do that again."

"Still not exculpated from that, I see?"

"You are supposed to set an example for junior officers," William replies, putting a certain frosty emphasis on the word example. With every new tooth in his partner's widening grin his patience whittles down a notch and his imaginary blood pressure rises another one.

“Last year was an embarrassment,” he continues. “I don’t suppose you know what it’s like to get a personal call from Anderson _himself_ who graciously informed me that his brightest pupil was…was in Soho! How do you think that looks on my record as your partner, Sutcliffe?”

"But it was so much fun," Grell says, waving a hand donned with speckled nail polish. “Tony still calls me, you know. Besides,” he sits back in his chair and folds his arms, “I don’t much have a taste for redundancy. When you already know everything it’s like wearing a shirt, then wearing the same one two days later. I hardly see why I have to take the exams every year.”

"Alright, then. What was the Main Branch called before Angelin Mordred took over in 1247?"

Grell smirks. “Buggery.”

William gives a grim smile of his own and opens the first tome in front of him, which bears the title _Shinigami and Myopia._ They are in the archives section of the library and the quiet, fluttering sounds of rustling pages is magnified by the high ceilings. The smell of dust and old binding, to William at least, is exquisite. "Let's get started," he says.

Grell skims his notes, honest-to-god bored. With a grimace he observes the books on the table: _Notable Shinigami of the Personnel Department, Branch 14A_ , _A Detailed Account of the History of the London Division, Collected Works of Lawrence Anderson_... and so on and so forth. Yawn.

"Ah, here we are." William’s eyes come to rest on the rules and regulations page _("Shinigami with vision whose denominators exceed 20/400 should not be allowed to operate oversized weaponry...")._

"Really, Will," Grell groans, slumping over the table and burying his head in his arms, "that's so boring! Can't we do scythes? I want to do scythes!"

William sighs. The only way to counter his partner's epicene levity, he finds, is to give him what he wants for the time being. Or else he becomes completely unmanageable. "Fine. But just so you know, we're getting to this later, Sutcliffe," William says, ignoring Grell's muffled "whatever.”

He sets aside _Shinigami and Myopia,_ reluctantly taking out _Scythe Modification According to Gen. Aff. Guidelines._ "Now," he begins, opening up to the first chapter, "I'm sure you know the basic modification rules, so let's move on to the assembly." He flips to the index and eventually finds the section he is looking for.

Grell claps his hands together. At the time, William takes it as mere enthusiasm for getting past the insipid stuff. He should have known better.

"The next most important fact aside from your scythe being able to cut is needing a hand-guard," William recites, and watches, with some amount of wonder as Grell actually puts his pencil to use. "Right now, being recently graduated, we only have the metal scythes with the default hand-guard..." William then proceeds to launch into a tirade of rudimentary scythe modification.

After a few minutes, Grell holds up his hand. "Will?"

William pauses. He is just getting into screws, which is always the fun part. "What is it?"

"If you wanted to use an electric-powered scythe, can you put the spark plug on top of the cylinder that goes around the throttle trigger?"

William digs a finger into his ear and twists it. "...excuse me?"

Grell furrows his brow and opens his hand palm-up: the universal gesture for someone who is forced to state the obvious. "Well I was going to put it under the motor but then I realized it could go by the vent valve..."

"We're...not supposed to use electric-powered scythes," William says slowly. It is all he can manage at the moment. "It says so in sub-clause 9. Do we, ah, have to go over the guidelines again?"

"Please," Grell waves his hand, "I have those bloody _memorized_ —the only thing I bothered with, actually. Doesn't mean I care for them."

Naturally, Grell would be cognizant of all the rules and choose to ignore them. And wait. "Vent val— _throttle trigger?"_ William clears his throat and gives his head a little shake. "How exactly are you planning to modify your scythe, Grell Sutcliffe?"

Grell giggles, wiggling his index finger. "Wouldn't you like to know?"

William feels his right eyelid give a sporadic twitch. "Sutcliffe..."

"I mean, do you know how difficult it is to get an isolator plate?" Grell asks him, abruptly changing character. "And don't even _talk_ to me about where to find a chain more than four feet long. They don't even make those anymore—excuse me— _yet,_ so I had to do it myself."

"Sutcliffe."

"—and I wanted to put little skulls on my starter handle to match my glasses but that messed up the secondary pulley! Heaven forbid I come off raffish..."

_"Sutcliffe!"_

This finally seems to snap Grell back from his ramblings. He gives William a look of innocence, which, with his chatoyant butterscotch eyes and pointed teeth looks so very wrong. "Something the matter, Will?" he asks. He gives a gentle suck—quite deliberately, William’s sure, on the tip of his index finger.

William can feel the first pangs of a headache behind his eyes. He should have known, really, but sometimes it is so easy to forget that Grell’s stupidity is just as staged as the rest of his acts. William draws in a breath, silently counts to five in Latin, and exhales quietly.

"What you're saying to me now displays _highly_ advanced modification that you couldn't possibly have knowledge of, giving your current rank," he says.  

Grell flips his pencil to the other hand and wrinkles his nose good-naturedly. "Please, Will. What did you think I've been doing for the past year, going to molly houses in Soho?"

“You were going to molly houses in Soho,” William says, raising an eyebrow.

“Yes, but you should know by now I enjoy killing _way_ more than I do the wiles of masculine pulchritude.”

By now William has spent enough time with Grell to know him a little too well. He can detect the sweet wafture of Grell’s rosé perfume from across the corridor any day. He knows Grell keeps a diary, and writes it in macaronic verse so that none but him can understand it. He knows that on Fridays Grell likes to pester the Financial Division for impossible lagniappes whenever he gets stuck with overtime.

He has also become accustomed to Grell’s humor, and in a way it is worse than his own wasteland of dry wit. Most of the time Grell is too mercurial to ever tell if he is being serious, which makes most of the higher-ups just want to dump him in some obscure Division and be done with him.

William T. Spears narrows his eyes at Grell from across the table, and he sees that Grell is completely and wholly serious. Unbelievable.

"We…” he grapples for words. “We don't have the authorization yet to modify our scythes," he says finally, unable to come up with anything better. "The prelim forms aren't even issued until December."

Grell nods, busies himself with twirling a lock of red hair around one finger. "I know."

"Wait don't tell me, you went ahead and did it anyway."

Grell relinquishes the strand of hair he had been playing with and grins like a shark. Perfect white-pointed teeth are exposed. They seem abnormally long in the shadows of the library. William feels his mood sink a little further into the mud.

"Putting the legality issues aside, you know the humans _might_ notice that you're about a century too early with the electricity," he points out.

Grell shrugs. "They’ll blame it on the devil," he replies. "Bring back some religion to the Motherland. And quite frankly," he cups a hand around his mouth, adopting a stage-whisper, "I've never really _blended in._ Not the style of an actress, that."

Grell does have a point there, so William sighs and asks, because he has to, "What is it?"

"You'll see," Grell replies. "Something that will make quite a splash of red!”

William pinches the bridge of his nose tightly. He finds himself wishing that Grell _had_ been spending more time in the molly houses. He knows that the atemporal life of a Shinigami can be boring to the point of madness for some, and a part of him cannot blame Grell for this. An _extremely tiny_ part. Hell, he almost wants Sutcliffe to find himself a nice bloke, drink some chartreuse, hand-make kohl and belladonna and floral unguents in his room on Friday evenings. Forget about finding more exciting ways to dismember humans.

"I fear for your subordinates one day," William says aloud, and gives his glasses a rough push up the bridge of his nose hard enough to leave a red mark. He closes _Scythe Modification According to Gen. Aff. Guidelines,_ because having it open seems fruitless by this point. "I'm not covering for you when the General Affairs finds out about this," he adds.

"Yes, yes, I know how they are about paperwork," Grell replies, snorting, "but my scythe is a beauty. And I'm really good at the alterations!"

That is what’s so infuriating about this whole thing, William thinks. Two years with the nutter and William still forgets that he is this advanced in mechanics. Then again, Sutcliffe obfuscates his genius with such puerile antics that William cannot blame himself too much in the end. Let the Personell Department take care of Grell when he and his scythe get into trouble.

"Fine, Sutcliffe, study session over. Do what you want." Grell claps his own book shut and pushes his chair back, triumphant. William pretends not to notice. He isn't a babysitter, and if Grell wants to get his senior's license taken away, that will only mean one less fruitcake to worry about. Not his problem.

If he could only hear himself ninety years down the road, on a cloudy London evening with the eviscerated entrails of a ladybird steaming in the air and the buzz of a chainsaw in the distance, he probably would have rephrased.

 

 

End.

**Author's Note:**

> This is another revamp of a fic I wrote last year. I don't read Kuroshitsuji any more, as it has gotten a bit dull, but there are several things about the series that I still find interesting. These guys, for one.


End file.
